Let’s twist again: a chaotic first effort laced with surreal shades of Philip K. Dick and other unusual suspects.
A woman kidnapped by invaders dreams of angels, demons, and more otherworldly creatures.
Debut novelist Rodriguez unloads a truckload of nightmares in a baker’s dozen worth of stories, enveloped in a weird, circular narrative. When Betty Hill is abducted by little gray men, she’s sure she’s gone around the bend and will wake up back in the 1960s. To her horror, she learns that they’re really hyperevolved humans who left Earth to travel through space and time. Unfortunately, her recruitment as savior of the human race opens her up to all sorts of alternative stories playing out across dimensions and, as it turns out, in her mind. Leaning mostly into science fiction, questions of faith, and the nature of humanity, the stories that spin out in Betty’s mind are shocking, imaginative, and messy. Many deal with societal conflicts, ranging from sexuality and identity in the opener, “Gender Reveal,” to a creepy caste system for teens in “Five Hives.” You wouldn’t go amiss thinking you’re watching TV under the influence via several stories about cops where past and future police officers tackle everything from the horror of confronting human evil in “Crazy Shark” to takes on racism and authoritarianism in “Sunday Funday” and even a shot at Minority Report in “RCPD: Reincarnation Pre-Crime Division.” Most of the stories lean pretty dystopian, but the heightened absurdity provides a welcome break in the tension. “Untitled YouTube Commercial” is one of these throwaway gems, satirizing web grifters and hustle culture, while “The Council” uses biblical and epistolatory tradition to Behind the Music the Bible. After a grand tour of fantasized futures, Rodriguez eventually brings us back around to Mrs. Betty Hill—yes, that Betty Hill, for you alien abduction truthers—and closes the circle with one more reveal.
Let’s twist again: a chaotic first effort laced with surreal shades of Philip K. Dick and other unusual suspects.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781963511215
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flare Books/Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
